Abstract

The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster has emerged as a popular model to investigate fundamental principles of neural circuit operation. The sophisticated genetics and small brain permit a cellular resolution understanding of innate and learned behavioural processes. Relatively recent genetic and technical advances provide the means to specifically and reproducibly manipulate the function of many fly neurons with temporal resolution. The same cellular precision can also be exploited to express genetically encoded reporters of neural activity and cell-signalling pathways. Combining these approaches in living behaving animals has great potential to generate a holistic view of behavioural control that transcends the usual molecular, cellular and systems boundaries. In this review, we discuss these approaches with particular emphasis on the pioneering studies and those involving learning and memory.

Highlights

  • The appreciation that behaviours are orchestrated by functioning neural circuits has led to several large-scale projects that are attempting to map neural diagrams of mammalian and insect brains [1,2,3,4]

  • Even the relatively simple 302 neuron connectome of the round worm Caenorhabditis elegans, which has been known for 30 years [5,6], is insufficient to explain the animal’s behaviour because internal states and experience modulate and alter the efficacy of the neural networks [7]

  • On top of a connectome, one needs to assign the mode of signalling to each component neuron, have an appreciation of the strength of connections between neurons, in addition to learning how different behavioural states of the animal alter the neural circuit dynamics

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Summary

Introduction

The appreciation that behaviours are orchestrated by functioning neural circuits has led to several large-scale projects that are attempting to map neural diagrams of mammalian and insect brains [1,2,3,4]. It perhaps seems obvious that achieving such a complete picture of a brain is easier when studying animals, such as invertebrates, that have a relatively small nervous system These numerically reduced systems are likely to provide the first opportunities to model realistic brain function and to understand how adaptive and context-appropriate behavioural control arises. Recent revolutionary developments allow investigators to switch identified neurons on and off while recording consequences in larger neural networks, as the animal behaves. Many of these tools and approaches were first demonstrated in research using the fruit fly Drosophila as a model, and these will be emphasized in this review. Either a heterologous or ectopic manner, fly researchers have probed how neural circuit activity translates to behavioural control, and even how memory is used

The fruit fly as a model for behaviour
Cell-specific gene expression
Temporal control of specific neurons
Recording circuit physiology
Combining the approaches to assemble functional neural pathways
Closing remarks
Methods
59. Dietzl G et al 2007 A genome-wide transgenic RNAi
68. Diao F et al 2015 Plug-and-play genetic access to
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